International Diabetes Federation Europe and IBM partner in ‘augmented research’ for insights into patient care

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For years, diabetes has grown at an alarming rate. According to the World Health Organization, there are now 60 million people with diabetes in Europe alone. In preparation for World Diabetes Day 2017, the European branch of the International Diabetes Foundation (IDF Europe)* decided to investigate how to improve diabetes care in Europe through their research “Integrating diabetes evidence into practice: challenges and opportunities to bridge the gaps”. Within the context of an Impact Grant, IBM proposed a collaboration in which a innovative “augmented” research method was adopted. Based on advanced analytics capabilities, the research was completed in 4 months, where it would typically have taken up to one year using traditional research methods. This is an important gain of time for one of the most pressing health issues facing the world.

Accelerate and augment the review of scientific literature using IBM’s Analytics capabilities

The starting point and backbone of the study which IDF Europe conducted was the review of scientific literature on the barriers for optimal diabetes care. Making use of contextual natural language processing, a specifically designed text analytics solution was able to read and interpret large amounts of scientific literature. The solution correlates similar ideas and concepts across documents and categorizes the scientific evidence according to their viewpoint – a task which is highly time-consuming and prone to human error. By creating a user-friendly interface, IDF Europe’s researchers could consult the evidence and read the full text of those scientific publications which were sure to contain the relevant information, significantly reducing the time spent compared to traditional literature review. The exercise positioned IDF Europe to identify the most relevant studies, to uncover trends and to determine the three most common barriers which had been widely addressed in previous academic literature, namely cost, clinical inertia and quality of care.

Combining scientific, questionnaire analysis and external data

Second, a questionnaire was sent to IDF Europe’s 70 member organizations. The purpose was to investigate, from the perspective of patients, policy members and healthcare professionals, the gaps which prevent the implementation of optimal diabetes care, so that targeted recommendations could be provided for each of the 47 countries IDF Europe is active in. The questionnaire outcomes were correlated with external data such as information on Disability-Adjusted Life Years from the World Health Organization, as well as the healthcare expenditure on diabetes care of each country, allowing to observe similar tendencies in diabetes care in regions with a similar healthcare system.

Discovering patient’s needs using Social Media Listening

A third way in which IBM helped deepen the insights was by identifying through social media analysis barriers diabetes patients are facing, comorbidities associated with diabetes, the most common diabetes-related topics discussed online and the most influential authors on social media for diabetes advocacy. Using numeric evidence, IBM’s social media analytics solution also compared the social media presence of diabetes patients with that of other patients suffering from chronic illness. This allowed us to identify the topics which occupy diabetes patients most, as well as the worries they have about their illness. The insights gathered from the social media analysis positioned IDF Europe to create targeted social media content which appeals to the population of diabetes patients and their relatives, and allows them to reach out to influential authors for potential collaboration.

By using different state-of-the-art analytics techniques, IDF Europe was able to retrieve insights they would not have obtained through traditional forms of research. IBM’s innovative combination of text analytics and social media analysis tools, as well as the analytical expertise of the IBM team, allowed IDF Europe to combine different data sources and compare insights found in each of the data sources. Using the insights created by working with IBM, a more comprehensive picture of the patient, healthcare provider and policy maker’s perspectives on diabetes care in Europe was developed and  the International Diabetes Foundation was able to formulate with great accuracy a strategy for transforming the insights into actions for improving diabetes care in Europe.

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*IDF Europe – The European chapter of the International Diabetes Foundation represents 70 national diabetes organizations in 47 countries across Europe. For more information, visit the IDF Europe website.